Update2012.com was founded in early
2009 by John Major Jenkins, who since the 1980s has defined and debated key
issues on the question of reconstructing what the ancient Maya believed about
2012. He is the author of articles, peer-reviewed papers and presentations, and
three much cited pioneering books on 2012: The 2012 Story
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2009), Galactic Alignment (Inner Traditions, 2002),
and his magum opus Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (Bear & Co., 1998). His
first encounter with the 13-Baktun cycle-ending of the Maya Long Count was in
1976.

Update2012.com began with the
intention of reviewing and critiquing news reports, academic and popular
publications, and media treatments of 2012. The monthly updates for the year
2009 (in the left pane) reflect this multi-pronged approach. After 2009 it was
clear that the media and pop-culture distortions of 2012 were going to
accelerate along predictable lines of undiscerning stupidity, often falsely framing
2012 as a “hoax”, so Jenkins focused his efforts on what was starting to be produced
by professional scholars (Mayanists, astronomers, and anthropologists among
other) on the subject. The updates in the left pane are monthly through 2009;
thereafter, yearly overviews are provided for 2010 - 2013.

Two access points are provided in the
top window, where the various internal pages of this site are organized for
easy access to the reader. The "Response to Critics" is organized by
the scholar's or scientist's name, with specific reference to their critiques
of Jenkins's work. The "Overview and Conclusion" link provides a
brief overview of academic attitudes toward 2012, well documented on this
website, and a conclusion.

Latest News:

New Book Release, March 2017:

Ivory Tower, House of Cards: How Scholars and Their Publishers Violate Science. ISBN: 978-0-9985868-2-3.
162 pages. Maya Studies, Academic Ethics.
Available at Amazon and Create Space.

This book is a narrative of over two decades of exchanges with scholars, their academic publishers and employers, and the professional association that oversees and validates them. It focuses on recent exchanges, largely in 2015, and documents a series of officially filed error lists and complaints regarding scholarly errors needing correction, and the responses of the publishers, the science agency (NASA), and committees (the AAUP) that are appointed to oversee and uphold academic standards. A bizarre world of contradictions, evasions, bigotry, and sanctioned character assassination is exposed, indicting an elite club of Ivory Tower scholars, friends and colleagues engaged in sloppy research and guild protection whose behavior violates science and threatens their bastion of unethical self-interest with immanent collapse, like a flimsy house of cards.

August 1, 2014. Publication of my
peer-reviewed paper, “The Coining of the Realm (of the 2012 Phenomenon)”, in Zeitschrift
für Anomalistik(14),
January 2014, Nr. 1, pp. 53-62.I critiqued and
corrected errors in the essay by Kevin Whitesides and John Hoopes titled “Seventies
Dreams and 21st Century Realities”, and they offered their invited response. My
summary of the exchange with my responses to the various shenanigans are here: